Mistress of the Jolly Dark

About Me

I write about people that are much much smarter than me. See the links on my shiny blog? I wrote those. And some other stuff. Below is the kind of thing you would find about me in the back of a book or anthology.

"Kelly Hale lives in the magical city called Stumptown where
the streets are paved with espresso beans and the garbage recycles itself. She
is the author of several science fiction-y type stories in scattered
anthologies, co-author of a Doctor Who TV tie-in novel Grimm Reality, and also won an award for an early version of
Erasing Sherlock – there was a giant novelty check involved.She is mother of geeks and stand-up
comedians. When she isn’t writing she enjoys grinding bones to make artisan
breads, creating her own skin care products from locally sourced virgins blood,
and knitting with razor wire. She’s been a fan of science fiction and fantasy
since age 11. Characters from the original Star Trek represent
archetypes in her dreams."

Friday, September 16, 2016

So. I handed out all these cards at Willamette Writer's Conference with my contact info, and my goodreads author's list, and where one could purchase my novel (on kindle) and just discovered Erasing Sherlock was "pending" publication for a month. Apparently when I tried to get a copy of the cover off the Amazon publishing site (so I could make the above mentioned cards), I somehow gave the publishing platform the impression that I was uploading a new cover image. And it put a hold on publication (even though it has been available for 6 years). Anyone who tried to buy my book because I gave them a card would have been unable to do so. For a freaking month.

I suck at self-promotion. Let's just get that clear. Also, I'm off Facebook and feel that no one can hear my cries of anguish now. Although I have less anguish now that I'm not reading about others all the time. Also, I am actually making things with my hands, heart and mind.

Still, I did not make best use of my Willamette Writer's Conference investment. I feel like crying (and will as soon as I get offline). I had 18,000 dollars in February and today I have about 4000. I better finish (write) that novel huh?

Friday, August 19, 2016

A little bit ago the sudden thought sprang into my head of how I
wished I had a husband - a proper broken-in husband that I've been
together with for years, who gets me, who likes some of the things I
like (but not everything) who doesn't really notice me farting, or at
least doesn't bother to say anything, merely moves downwind and keeps on
reading his book and I keep on reading mine. We don't sit on the couch
together because I have my chair and he likes to stretch out on the
entire length of the sofa. He loves me in my womanly form and has seen a
number of versions of it. I talk to him while brushing my teeth. We
both love sci-fi, but don't go to conventions out of town because
they're too expensive. He was married before and has grown kids and that
works great because I was too and I do too. We take trips separately
sometimes. We have sex sometimes. We sleep in the same bed sometimes but
often must sleep separately because one of us snores. We hold hands
sometimes, but don't have to. We don't have to talk but love to talk.

Most of the time I don't miss having a coupled relationship. When I had
it in the past it was fraught with all that youthful nonsense,
biological urges, drama, romance, the chemicals of lust in love. I don't
want romance. I don't want to date. All that stuff makes me really
uncomfortable these days. I don't have the patience to keep my opinions
to myself.

I realized that I want male/female companionship that is already lived in. I
want an old married relationship in some kind of easy to swallow tablet. I don't want to go through all that fuss and bother with the dating and the tentative getting to know each other stage.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

A truth every kid who grew up on 1960’s and 70’s television understood:
There was no escaping Gilligan’s Island.
We could accept that, my brothers and I, because otherwise what would we watch on
Monday nights?What we couldn’t
accept was the Professor telling Gilligan he couldn’t fly. Gilligan flew
just fine until the Professor told him it was impossible. It was that word – impossible – the Professor's ultimate betrayal, the terribly grown-up
denial of the evidence of his own two eyes. Lack of belief was like the flu, we thought. If
you caught it, you crashed. My brother Scott tested this theory by jumping off
our roof with wings he’d made from a broken umbrella and old sheets. We shouted
our belief at him, "You're gonna fly! We know you can!" But our belief wasn’t strong enough to keep him from
breaking his arm.

Another
thing learned from television was that marrying one of the Cartwright's was a
death sentence. Worse, the next week it would be as if the bride had never
existed. Sometimes, the next episode would even be a comedy! It was jarring. Not just emotionally, but from
a character standpoint. What kind of a man would be in a comedy situation just
one week after the love of his life died tragically taking a bullet meant for
him?I used to write odes to the dead, motherless
girls (they never had mothers either), because Adam and Little Joe certainly
weren’t going to get around to it.

There was another show called Here
Come the Brides, set in Seattle. The whole point of this show was getting rugged men married. On Here Come the Brides, three
brothers named Jason, Joshua, and Jeremy Bolt, owned a mountain and ran a logging
camp on that mountain. (I think they may also be the reason so many boys were
named Jason, Joshua, or Jeremy in years following.) Jason Bolt makes a deal with
the owner of the lumber mill, Aaron Stempel that if Stempel puts up the money
to bring marriageable young ladies to Seattle, they will all be wed within the
year. If not, then Stempel gets the Bolt’s mountain and logging operation.
Aaron plots against the good brothers at every turn, of course. He’s the
villain of the piece. I had a tiny crush on him as well because he just wanted
to be loved and he didn’t know how to get that except with money and power.

The theme song, about the bluest skies
being in Seattle, was sung by the guy who played Jeremy, the youngest brother
of three. Weirdly, his real name escapes me though his face was all over the
pages of Tiger Beat and Teen Beat and 16 Magazine (along with his opinions
about how much makeup girls should wear, etc.), but on the show his name was
Jeremy. Anyway, his real name doesn’t matter because I am never in love with the actors, only the characters they play. (I
remember someone telling me many years later that Patrick Stewart was gay and me
saying, I don’t want to marry Patrick Stewart, I want to
marry Captain Jean-Luc Picard. I wanted to marry Mighty Mouse when I was 6. I
had a type.)

Jeremy Bolt was the one all my friends loved best. We were
supposed to. He was designed for us to love. But I did not. I fancied Jason, the handsome eldest
of the Bolt siblings. My love for him was the same sort I felt for Captain
James T. Kirk in Star Trek. Not for me the Beatles’ bewigged Ensign Chekov. I wasn’t even a
Spock girl at the time. True, Spock gave hope
to geeks and nerds everywhere that genius could be both heroic and sexy (even if actual
sex only happened every seven years), but I liked a sure thing. I wanted someone
who didn’t take so much work, a man with experience, who knew what was what and
how to get the job done through pure force of will and gumption and some ineffable
quality, possibly optimism.

Kirk could cure, help, and change world views of entire planets by
having sex with a single member of an alien race.But more significantly, to the young me at
least, was that he could love them and they (usually) didn’t have to die for
it. They’d be changed by the encounter, but mostly went on with their lives. That
time he had to sacrifice his love in Depression era New York in order to save
the future of humankind, you could tell it affected him deeply by the way the
censors let him say “Let’s get the hell
out of here,” even though nobody was allowed to say curse words on broadcast
television. And the very next week he loses his brother to a horrible
mind-sucking parasite at Colony Alpha and almost loses Spock as well so I could
cut him some slack for not appearing to be mourning the woman he loved enough
to say “hell.” I probably wrote poetry about it though. (I also wrote poetry
about the death of Miramanee, his pregnant Native American princess. I know.
Shut up.)

I don’t remember a lot of the stories on Here Come the Brides the way I remember every episode of the original Star Trek, but I’m pretty sure Jason Bolt was a lot like
Kirk – fighting for what’s right and sexing up the ladies. Also, the actor who
played him was once on an episode of Star Trek. Come to think of it, so was the
actor who played the middle brother Joshua. He had a small part as a native
with a puff of white hair and coppery make-up. All the natives of the planet were
copper colored and wore sarongs and served the great computer god Vaal. As per
usual Kirk destroys paradise, and in the end sexual reproduction is reintroduced
and everyone has a good laugh.

(Nineteen years later I hosted a party “Welcome to Vaal-hollow!" We dressed in sarongs and had tiki torches in the back yard, playing the
natives of that sorry planet who were forced to run a themed resort with coconut
bras and gambling because we didn't have a computer god providing for our needs, thanks a lot Captain Kirk.)

My
best friends through junior high and high school were Connie and her sisters,
Lisa and Nancy. Connie and I used to spend hours on the phone talking about Star Trek and Here Come the Brides and Alias
Smith and Jones and other shows with handsome men who didn’t live in the
current era. We wrote stories about these shows in dedicated spiral notebooks secreted
under piles of homework in desk drawers. We shared snippets at lunch and read
aloud to each other during sleepovers. I spent a lot of time at their house,
weekends and sometimes whole weeks in the summer. We’d watch reruns of Star
Trek every afternoon. By the time I was sixteen I’d seen all 72 episodes four
or five times.

Connie’s mother was originally from Biloxi, Mississippi. We used to live across the
street from each other, that’s how we became best friends, but she’d made them move
to a new neighborhood when the Bustamante family bought the house next door. They were Mexican and she
was deeply, embarrassingly, racist.Her
daughters were often mortified by the stuff that came out of her mouth. It
didn’t come out often because she carefully avoided all sources of her racist discomfort.
This included TV shows with black people as lawyers, police detectives, spies,
nurses, or teachers played by Diahann Carroll, for example. So whenever the famous “first
interracial kiss on television” episode of Star Trek was on we’d stage it so
that Nancy, the youngest, would cry for assistance and Mommy would come running
down the basement stairs just in time to see Kirk and Uhura kissing. She’d get
red in the face and say, “Oh you girls! I swear!” and march back up to the
kitchen, seething. And we’d laugh and laugh. She fell for it every time. She
thought we were rude, mean girls. She may even have thought it was my idea, but I don’t remember
it being my idea the first time we did it. I think it was Nancy’s. She was a Captain
Kirk girl like me.

Sometime
in high school I switched allegiances. I was more mature. I saw Brewster McCloud at an art house cinema
downtown. I read Stranger in a Strange
Land, and Dune and tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow because I thought I
should.Kung Fu with David Carradine was on television and suddenly,
sensitive guys who could kick ass made me tingle. Kwai Chang Caine and Spock were
thrillingly calm under pressure. They had mastery over their emotions. This
seemed really important what with my parents divorcing, all my friends staging sit-ins
for counterculture-y reasons, and me trying to get my Catholic boyfriend to go
all the way in the front seat of his Plymouth Roadrunner. (Not the back seat.
He was saving himself for marriage.)

In college a bunch of people met every afternoon in the
student lounge to watch Star Trek reruns with a hip new perspective. My friend
Chris used to flip his wallet open and ask Scotty to beam him up some cash. I had
an Iranian boyfriend, Saiid, whose father was the Shah’s veterinarian. Saiid cried
at the episode where Spock falls in love with the woman in the cave and then
has to leave her because she’ll die if she tries to go back through the time
portal. My boyfriend could not go back to Iran. His father did not survive the
revolution.

One day I’m driving to work when I see a guy with a guitar case and his
thumb out.He’s got this Peter Frampton hair
thing going on, sky blue bellbottoms, and a fringed jacket. Normally I wouldn’t pick up a hitchhiker on
account of psychopathic murderer potential, and especially one who looked like
Peter Frampton (I was never a fan of the masturbatory guitar solo). But he
smiled and I swear the sun sparked off his teeth and blinded me to any danger.
I pulled over, he got in, we talked for two hours, moved in together two weeks
later and were married the following year.

After he left me on my birthday with a two-month old baby to care for
alone (because, as he said “You can get on welfare and I’ll have nothing, so
I’m actually doing you a favor.”), I’m wandering around Powell’s Books with ten
dollars left of my birthday money and I spot a new Star Trek novel called Ishmael.It shows Mr. Spock seated at a poker table with another vaguely familiar
looking man, both in old-timey clothes. I realize the other man is either
Spock’s father, Sarek, or Aaron Stempel from Here Come the Brides (both played
by the same actor). It’s the ultimate crossover!I’m very embarrassed to be seen buying it but
that doesn’t stop me.

I have carried this book around with me for decades now. I think it
saved my life at the time, pulled me out of a very dark place. Within its pages
I rediscovered all my favorite beau ideals. I realized that good men of good
character would not exist in books or onscreen without existing somewhere out
there in the real world. I had a son. He didn’t have to be a Cartwright. He
could be a Kwai Chang

Caine, a Jean-Luc
Picard.

He grew up to be none of those, thank god.
He grew up to be an excellent human being in his own right. And our world looks
very different today, a perpetual cross-over of genres and media platforms. People
like me have raised people like him, who celebrate and even enjoy humanity’s cultural differences,
who champion equal rights for all humans, who can gather support for these causes
in seconds, who
make television shows where if a girl dies no one has forgotten her by the next
episode.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

I pitched a novel this morning to Kisa Whipkey with Reuts Publications. I much prefer to pitch with the query letter or proposal, because in person is nerve-wracking. I'm a little embarrassed that I completely forgot to give her my actual publishing history. Thankfully, I left her my card.

I read at an open-mike last night. There were a lot of great poets there (whose names I cannot remember at the moment. Sorry poets I'll come back and fill in the blanks later). I had been in a workshop with two of them - a workshop about how to finish those poems that never seem to feel finished. They had both finished their troublesome poems. I had not, which is why I ended up reading work-in-progress prose.

Also attended a panel discussion with editors of literary magazines. I remember all those years ago when my dream was to get a story into some prestigious literary magazine and how I was convinced you had to have some freaking MFA to get into one because everyone knew everyone and it was terribly incestuous. Which they admitted to - with caveats. Because of how long it takes for literary magazines to actually get through the slush piles, to go through committee to get published, the slow turnaround time, apparently a lot of simultaneous submissions are withdrawn because they've been picked up elsewhere. So what's an editor with a time crunch to do then? Call around to MFA programs. It was comforting to hear and also to learn that MFA does not equal great writing. In fact, sometimes the opposite.

DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON AN MFA! (Unless you want to teach other MFA students someday.)

I am also forced to acknowledge that the reason my stories were never picked up by prestigious literary magazines is because they weren't very good back then. I am a much better writer now.

Anyway, I left feeling more confident - at least for my chances with the middle-tier literary magazines. And the editor from Calyx Press was on this panel. Calyx was the first feminist literary work I read. So... maybe it's time I submit something?

One of the best workshops today was run by a woman I met last night before the banquet dinner - historical fiction writer, Roberta Rich - who graciously walked me through my novel pitch before the meal and who today had some great approaches to research and how to apply what you find.

Writers conferences have always been out of my price range (and they likely will be again). I have mocked the foolishness of people who paid thousands of dollars to go to a conference in Hawaii, which to me always seems like a way for industry people to get free vacations at the expense of rich dilettantes. But next year I'll have to volunteer to get a price break. Because I'm definitely going back.

A lot of other things, panels, workshops, conversations, etc. about which I took copious notes, but that will have to wait until my brain returns to normal functioning. Not much sleep that past three days.

In the meantime - thanks to Jenny Schrader and all the WWC volunteers and staff. Nicely done.

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Next weekend is the Willamette Writer's Conference. The first time I've ever been able to afford to go. I am officially a member, but haven't made it to any talks or anything. Why? Lazy? Introverted? Anxiety medication not working? All of the above. (I actually don't take anxiety medication, so...) I have to get some stuff ready for the conference. I am refusing to pay for pitch sessions. But I won't talk about that here.

I've been writing every single day for the past month and a half. I'm kind of sick of it actually. One story finished that I was a month late getting to the editor. One research paper draft turned in on time. I am very slow at writing these days. My process isn't efficient. I don't know how to make it more efficient.

My writing process has become this - I build the thing in layers. So I'll write like 200 words and then go back and fill in, then move forward a little and go back and fill in. I remember when I used to just write scenes as they came up and then I would go back and link them (or not) but these days I seem to be so linear about it all. Maybe that's because I've been writing papers for school for the past 7 years.

I don't know. I have another story I want to work on and it's really a great idea I think, but all the submission deadlines are coming up soon and I'm pretty sure I won't make it. I'm sort of fried in the brain pan.

My brain is tired and yet -- I guess when you've been doing something daily for nearly 8 hours a day when you're trying to take a break from it, your brain keeps telling you need to get back to work.